The Washington Post has the story of a Georgian Grand Master who has been expelled from a chess tournament in Dubai:

“Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet,” Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. “I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren’t occupied.”

Petrosian complained to the officials. After Nigalidze left the bathroom once more, officials inspected the interior and say they found an iPhone wrapped in toilet paper and hidden behind the toilet.

The thing that I really cannot understand about such behaviour is how an individual lives with it. Would you really look yourself in the mirror and think ‘Champion’, or would you see ‘Cheat’. Or if you justified it by choosing to believe that “everybody is doing it”, would you simply see ‘Champion Cheat’?

Cheating utterly defeats the purpose of competing in the first place:

“A friend of mine recently joked that his mobile phone will beat Magnus Carlsen,” Short said, referring to the Norwegian chess prodigy who is the world’s No. 1 player. “I said, ‘What are you talking about? My microwave could beat Magnus Carlsen.’”

2 Responses to 324. Chess Cheats

Where do I begin ? How does he live with the idiocy of hiding the phone wrapped in loo paper, behind the same toilet each time?? Did he also not think he would start showing a pattern of incontinence ? There was not one single smart move here, not on the chess board (phone inspired), not in the competition arena, not in the bathroom and, certainly, not in his own mind. Not a champion in any sense – except in his own mind !